Some observations on the big issues of the world and the little things in life.

Monday, April 30, 2012

Facing Challenges vs. THE APOCALYPSE

I've spent some time here observing and ruminating on the challenges we face, particularly energy supplies (peak oil, fracking etc.) and climate change. The flip side to denying these issues is the apocalyptic doomers who use these issues to declare the imminent end of civilization of human extinction. I've always felt the doomeres are as much a problem in the denialists, so I was pleased to see this article by Matthew Gross and Mel Gilles in The Atlantic, How Apocalyptic Thinking Prevents Us from Taking Political Action:

How to make sense of it all? After all, not every scenario can be an
apocalyptic threat to our way of life -- can it? For many, the tendency
is to dismiss all the potential crises we are facing as overblown:
perhaps cap and trade is just a smoke screen designed to earn Al Gore
billions from his clean-energy investments; perhaps terrorism is just an
excuse to increase the power and reach of the government. For others,
the panoply of potential disasters becomes overwhelming, leading to a
distorted and paranoid vision of reality and the threats facing our
world -- as seen on shows like Doomsday Preppers. Will an epidemic wipe
out humanity, or could a meteor destroy all life on earth? By the time
you're done watching Armageddon Week on the History Channel, even a rapid reversal of the world's magnetic poles might seem terrifyingly likely and imminent.

Gross and Gilles continue:

The danger of the media's conflation of apocalyptic scenarios is that it
leads us to believe that our existential threats come exclusively from
events that are beyond our control and that await us in the future --
and that a moment of universal recognition of such threats will be
obvious to everyone when they arrive. No one, after all, would ever
confuse a meteor barreling toward Earth as anything other than
apocalyptic. Yet tangled up in such Hollywood scenarios and sci-fi
nightmares are actual threats like global warming that aren't arriving
in an instant of universal recognition; instead, they are arriving amid
much denial and continued partisan debate.

For example, annual climate-related disasters such as droughts, storms,
and floods rose dramatically during the last decade, increasing an
average 75 percent compared to the 1990s -- just as many climate models
predicted they would if global warming were left unchecked. Yet this
rise in natural disasters hasn't produced a moment of universal
recognition of the dangers of climate change; instead, belief in climate
change is actually on the decline as we adjust to the "new normal" of
ever-weirder weather or convince ourselves that our perception of this
increased frequency is a magnifying trick of more readily available
cable and Internet coverage.